Traffic and Terror
I'm not sure I buy all of Hans Monderman's ideas about traffic engineering, but I definitely enjoyed Mark Steyn's defense of them:
But, alas, on the state highways New Hampshire is going in the opposite direction to Mr Monderman. On formerly scenic Interstate 89, the discreet mile markers have been augmented by eye-level markers every fifth of a mile reminding you what road you're on and that it's been 0.2 miles since the last reminder. Until this summer, if you were on a bendy road following a river, you'd take the curves carefully lest you plunged over the edge and died in a gasoline fireball at the foot of the ravine. That happened to some poor fellow every 93 years or so, so now they've put up metal barriers along the picture-postcard river roads punctuated every couple of hundred yards by ugly-ass shock-absorbers that look like trash cans. So now you don't have to worry about plunging into the river because the barrier will bounce you back into the road to be sliced in two by the logging truck. The uglification of New Hampshire's highways is a good example of how, even in a small-government state, the preferred solution to any problem real or imaginary is more government.
From there Steyn moves to the war on terror, defending the idea that it's generally better to devolve power to individuals than to give more of it to the state. Solid stuff, mostly, though I can't imagine what he was thinking when he wrote this:
In his last book, published a few months ago, the late Anthony Sampson claimed that after September 11 'the fear of terrorism strengthened the hands of all governments'. It certainly shouldn't have. In America, I don't believe it did.
Uh … right. By the way, I'm going to have to confiscate those scissors.
[Via Lew Rockwell.]